TV Is Dead. Now What?

In the annals of political lore, the transformative effect of the 1960 debate between Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy has a way of getting overstated. Nixon’s sweaty upper lip. Kennedy’s youthful vigor. Yes, it was the first to be televised, but the true moment when TV became the dominant force in our politics came four years later, in the form of a glowing mushroom cloud. President Lyndon B. Johnson’s “Daisy” ad—depicting a young girl counting flower petals, followed by a ferocious bomb blast and then an ominous reminder to get to the polls, lest the menacing Barry Goldwater somehow win (“the stakes are too high for you to stay home”)—aired only once. That was enough. A masterpiece of paranoia, the spot announced TV as a godsend for political campaigns and ushered in an era in which television and politics became inexorably linked.

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In mid-century America, with the entire country tuned in to the same three networks—and with social and economic pressures keeping ABC, CBS and NBC all in a zone of centrist consensus—broadcast television put the mass in mass media. Naturally, this made it a tremendous platform for political campaigns to reach an enormous audience with one message.

Today, though, the mass audience is dwindling, TV audiences are shrinking by the day, and the result is an upheaval for those in the business of winning elections using ads no less subtle than Johnson’s. But as the utility of TV wanes, savvy campaigns are adapting in a way that’s transforming their relationship to voters—they’re treating supporters less like targets and more like participants.

The first cracks in the mass advertising model occurred with the rise of cable TV—and later satellite—accessible to a majority of American households. (Currently about 90 percent of television-owning homes pay for TV through a cable, satellite or telephone company subscription.) Before this, CBS could amass 43 percent of TV viewers with an episode of Gunsmoke. Today’s most popular show barely breaks 10 percent.

Cable didn’t just rob broadcast networks of their big audience, though. It also exploded TV’s ability to keep the political debate in the reasonable middle of the spectrum. Princeton University professor Markus Prior has made a convincing case that cable TV has driven polarization in the American electorate, not because of the rise of partisan outlets like Fox News but because of the diminished importance of the centrist news shows aired on broadcast television compared with the wide variety of other programming. Years ago, it wasn’t necessarily news that people wanted to watch when they got home. They just wanted to watch TV, and the news was what was on. Once they were given the option of ESPN, viewers couldn’t change channels fast enough. This removed the population of politically uncommitted viewers from the news audience, leaving only the partisans.

For political campaigns looking to air advertisements, the response to the decline of broadcast-scale audiences was to replace a few huge ad buys with lots of little ones on many channels. This worked for a while and had the side effect of increasing the amount of money spent on political ads. The 2012 campaign cycle—which was marked by an unusually contentious Republican primary and was also the first presidential election after the Supreme Court’s decision striking down limits on campaign spending—generated more than $5 billion in television advertising, a record.

TV Ads Over? Hardly.

By Stuart Stevens

Time was, the conventional wisdom held that campaigns were won or lost on television—and the smart ones spent most of their money there. By the 1980s, I recall winning candidates routinely spending upward of 70 percent of their budgets on TV advertising. Things have changed a bit: Thanks to the profusion of things like web video, TV audiences are undoubtedly shrinking. But campaigning hasn’t changed as much as you might think. As a buyer at a Democratic firm said to me, “Just because you watch Hulu doesn’t mean that you don’t watch NFL football or Dancing With the Stars. People are still consuming an enormous amount of broadcast and cable television.”

Spending by candidates reflects that. Today, in my experience, the majority of successful campaigns still spend more than 50 percent of their budgets on television advertising (online spending accounts for closer to 10 to 20 percent). As campaign budgets continually increase, the actual dollars spent on television will rise, too. The next incumbent president, Democrat or Republican, is likely to raise more than $2 billion—and will spend a sizable chunk of it on TV because the medium remains perhaps the most powerful outreach tool a campaign can wield. In fact, in an era when technologies help viewers avoid ads on TV, there’s reason to think campaigns will spend in order to make them more noticeable. “DVRs and time-shifted television place an emphasis on creativity,” says Will Feltus, a vice president at National Media, one of the largest Republican media-buying firms. “If an ad jumps out, people are much more likely to stop and watch it.”

Stuart Stevens was a political consultant and strategist for Romney 2012.

A profitable business is not the same as a growing one, though. Indeed, TV’s economic fortunes are driven in part by its shrinking mass audience. (Imagine an island sinking into the sea; every year the shoreline shrinks, the value of beachfront property will increase.) From 2012 to 2013, pay-television providers recorded their worst year-long stretch ever—and in the third quarter of last year alone, cable companies lost 687,000 subscribers, according to estimates from Wall Street media analysts Craig Moffett and Michael Nathanson. Viewers are abandoning their TV sets to watch on new devices and through new distribution channels. From 2011 to 2012, the number of videos streamed on tablets and smartphones rose 300 percent, with digital outlets like YouTube, Hulu, Netflix and Amazon capturing both new users and more time spent.

In other words, the fragmenting that disrupted broadcast television is now happening to cable TV. And the hemorrhaging of audience is happening fastest with the youngest viewers; while TV consumption is declining in every age group, the rate at which 18-to-24-year-olds watch television is roughly half that at which 50-to-64-year-olds do. Add to this the ubiquity of DVR devices and on-demand television, which help viewers avoid commercials, and it’s easy to see why political campaigns will never be able to rely on television the way they once did.

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Clay Shirky is professor of new media at New York University and author of Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age.